A new SMAP soil moisture and vegetation optical depth product (SMAP-IB) is available

A new SMAP soil moisture (SM) and vegetation optical depth (L-VOD) product is available, called SMAP-INRAE-BORDEAUX or SMAP-IB (VERSION1). The SMAP-IB, a new 2-Parameter (2-P, i.e., SM and L-VOD) retrieval algorithm recently developed by INRAE Bordeaux (Li et al., 2022), relies on the mono-angle and dual-polarized TB observations from SMAP. As for our SMOS-IC product Version 2, SMAP-IB is based on the L-MEB (L-band Microwave Emission of the Biosphere) model to simultaneously retrieve SM and L-VOD and it is based on the soil and vegetation parameters developed for SMOS-IC (Fernandez-Moran et al., 2017; Wigneron et al., 2021). SMAP-IB incorporates the main characteristics of SMOS-IC: it does not use any modelled SM or vegetation data estimated from optical observations as input to the algorithm or to initialize the model inversion. More details about SMAP-IB can be found in Documentation section.